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Despite apparent similarities, the reports of two centrally
appointed committees are split on the relationship between knowledge,
skills and social needs

Two major reports with overlapping concerns were submitted to the
central government during the last decade. They were drafted by
committees appointed by two different offices of the same government.
One was chaired by Yash Pal, and the other by Sam Pitroda. The titles of
the two committees indicated both the contours of their deliberation as
well as areas of potential overlap. The first committee, chaired by
Yash Pal, was appointed by the Ministry of Human Resource Development in
2008, and was called the “committee to advise on rejuvenation and
renovation of higher education.” The second, chaired by Sam Pitroda, was
appointed by the Prime Minister’s Office in 2005 and carried the more
compact title, the “National Knowledge Commission (NKC).”

Both reports talk about expanding the provision of higher education
without sacrificing quality, and as such, a cursory reading would
suggest that there is not much difference between the views articulated
by the two groups. In the specific sphere of knowledge, both panels
favour imaginative interface between areas and disciplines as a means of
promoting creativity. They evince equal amounts of anxiety over the
problems of accreditation and licensing faced by institutions that
impart professional education. And, on the matter of institutional
fragmentation at the apex level, both recommend establishment of an
umbrella body capable of subsuming the overlapping functions of existing
structures. With so many apparent similarities, it is not surprising
that the Yash Pal report and Sam Pitroda’s NKC are routinely invoked in
the same breath whenever a new policy or decision comes up for
discussion. A careful decoding, however, reveals that the two reports
are based on contrasting perspectives on the relationship between
knowledge and education, and between these and social needs. From the
point of view of the political economy embedded in the two reports, the
visions of reform they endorse are incompatible.

Skill deficit

Both reports recognise a crisis in higher education, but their diagnosis
of the nature of that crisis is quite different. While NKC views the
narrow growth of higher education in the context of skills, it is not
quite clear how it relates the current parlance of “skill deficit” to
higher education. The idea comes across as an obvious issue or as an
assumption: “While higher education enrolment has to increase markedly,
the skill requirement of the growing economy means that a large
proportion of our labour force needs to be provided vocational education
and be trained in skills. This skill element has to be integrated with
the higher education system to ensure maximum mobility.” Confusing as
these words are, they convey the shape of things to come if NKC’s vision
becomes reality. The report discusses the paucity of skills in the vast
unorganised sector, but shows little interest in the context in which
this paucity has grown. After all, the economy must be in a position or
evolve towards one which provides employment prospects attractive to
skilled personnel.

Knowledge and skills

The fact that Indian manufacturing has provided slow employment growth —
called “jobless growth” during the 1990s — or that the IT-enabled
sector provides less than 0.5 per cent of total employment, indicates
that at least two sectors commonly linked with skills and the so-called
knowledge economy, respectively, are not in a position to provide
massive additional employment, or at least not immediately. No doubt the
economy might evolve, and these or other sectors change in ways that
provide additional employment, but the push for vocational skills,
whether or not at the cost of higher education, cannot ignore a detailed
plan of how industry-training linkages will also be simultaneously
developed. This is precisely what NKC ignores, harnessing the rhetoric
of knowledge with a variety of suffixes while refraining from relating
it to the actual needs of the economy or higher education.

A relevant analysis of this kind, i.e. focusing on working conditions,
livelihoods, and economic opportunities, was presented by a commission
chaired by the late Dr. Arjun Sengupta, which dealt with the crisis of
skill deficit in the larger context of poverty and working conditions.
Ignoring Sengupta’s recommendations for comprehensive measures, the NKC
opts for merely rebranding vocational education and training “to
increase its value and ability to command higher incomes.” This unusual
phraseology denotes rather transparently what must happen to the higher
education system. NKC is worried about its size and enrolment capacity
because it wants to use it for skilling. Vocational education will get
rebranded by the transformation of the bulk of higher education into a
skill-imparting apparatus, all unfortunately in the name of the
knowledge economy.

In fact, the dichotomisation of knowledge and skills is perhaps one of
the most problematic aspects in the current parlance of education. The
focus on skill development has emerged concomitantly with the discourse
of a “knowledge society” and “knowledge economy.” The relationship
between the two is not difficult to draw. Both are responding to the
large-scale deskilling that has taken place in the wake of technological
changes geared towards automation and efficiency. A new class of
corporate interests has emerged with the advent of new information
technology and footloose financial capital. New kinds of alliances have
emerged between the state and industry, even as education itself has
emerged as a key market. These alliances enable the state to freeze or
greatly reduce the employment it provides while allowing the so-called
knowledge industries to transform the nature and quality of employment
in the wider economy. Many different kinds of work have vanished from
the market, while others have got downgraded, reducing employment and
perpetuating deskilling, a scenario where educational planning is
doubtless deeply implicated. Governing the youth and managing their
prospects has always been important for the state, and now the latter
consists of transient opportunities for work, interspersed by modular
opportunities to learn new skills. This is where education is positioned
in the knowledge economy: it is supposed to control the social damage
caused by underemployment, casual work, deskilling and the associated
loss of self-identity.

The Yash Pal committee had a difficult task of suggesting ways to
rejuvenate an old, jaded higher education system in the middle of a
crisis of academic governance. The committee faced the challenge by
reiterating why the classical idea of a university is important — a
place where people think freely, and create new knowledge by engaging
with their milieu, thereby inducting the young into a culture of
thinking.

Undergraduate education

The largest such space available in the Indian system are the
undergraduate colleges affiliated to universities. Given India’s
demographic geography, these institutions served historically to harness
talent in dispersed locations under conditions of colonial
underdevelopment of the school system. The Yash Pal committee took a
bold stance in appreciating this role, examining the factors that have
undermined undergraduate education — including the gross inequality
between Central and State universities — and reaffirming its faith in
their academic potential while suggesting how to improve them. Instead,
NKC follows the popular trend of bemoaning these colleges for their ills
that actually stem from long-term, systemic neglect. Perceiving them as
a burden, NKC recommends the creation of an affiliating board and
converting undergraduate colleges into “community” colleges. The meaning
of this term derives from its history in the American system. Without
bothering to examine this history, NKC simply hijacks the word
“community” as part of the effort to rebrand vocational education, as it
then infiltrates undergraduate colleges. If this move becomes widely
implemented — a process that has indeed already begun — the sons and
daughters of India’s masses may anticipate a wilful snatching away of
their hard-won opportunity to access actual higher education.

In marked contrast, the Yash Pal committee differentiates between, and
explains how institutions providing vocational education can be linked
with universities. Similarly, for the training of school teachers at all
levels, the Yash Pal report suggests deeper academic engagement, not
the magical touch of information technology. In other areas of
professional training too, the Yash Pal perspective was to loosen the
grip of regulatory institutions whose monopolistic functioning is widely
acknowledged to have resulted in corruption.

The silent polemic underlying the two reports is thus sharp and
suggestive. If NKC guides the future course of higher education, its
crisis will deepen and what good is left in it will rapidly erode, with
painful consequences. That process has, in fact, begun. In the
meanwhile, Yash Pal has been chosen for the award of Padma Vibhushan,
apparently for his services to science and the cause of humanist
learning at school.

(Krishna Kumar is a former director of NCERT. He has been awarded an
honorary DLitt by the Institute of Education, University of London.)